Rhodes jolted back again at the sight of grid lines appearing in this beautiful, peaceful landscape. They didn’t look right against such a serene, natural backdrop.

He might have believed that this wasn’t really The Grid. Now he saw the evidence in front of his eyes when Fisher’s head and face changed. The image flashed in the shape of a Mask and then it started to change into a different face.

It didn’t change all the way into a different face. It stayed like that with this new face overlaid over the Mask head. Rhodes could see both at the same time. It definitely didn’t look like Fisher anymore.

This face wasn’t as angular and birdlike. It widened and shrank to more of a rounded, softer, even more human face. It was a man with darker brown hair, brown eyes, and sturdier, more muscular frame.

His arms were shorter and more powerful as were his legs and hands. He looked more like a man who might live in that primitive town—except that the Mask head and the grid lines’ constant presence made it so obvious that this wasn’t a real person, either.

“Who are you?” Rhodes husked. “What did you do with Fisher?”

The figure’s voice changed. It still sounded male, but it sounded like a completely different person.

The voice somehow matched the face hidden under the Mask. “Your SAM’s programming is still intact in your neural processing core. He is unharmed. We’ve simply prevented him from entering The Grid to talk to you. We wanted to talk to you first.”

“Who the hell are you?” Rhodes snapped. “Stop playing games and tell the truth.”

“We don’t have individuality the way you do. I’m a Mask—as you call us. I am simply the program the Masks are using to represent them in dialogue with you.”

“So…you’re not a real person.”

“I am a real person. All of us are. We are as real as your SAMs.”

“The SAMs are individuals. They’re sentient beings with separate personalities and names and appearances.”

“Would it help you if I had a name?”

“Do you have a name?” Rhodes demanded. “You just said you don’t have individuality the way we understand it.”

The Masks’ representative tilted his head to one side. He definitely didn’t do it the way Fisher would have. “If it helps you think of me as an individual, you may call me B.”

Rhodes snorted. “Why don’t you just call yourself X….or 10…..or any number or letter? How about I assign you a serial number? How about 57368? That would be a perfect name for you.”

“I like B better.”

Rhodes rolled his eyes to heaven. “Whatever. You aren’t an individual. Fisher is. You’ll never understand that.”

“That is why we need to study you—to find out what you have that we don’t.”

“You just said it yourself. We have individuality. You’d never be able to understand that if you studied us for a million years.”

“We plan to try even if it takes a million years. The SAMs are a much more complete version of our programming. We need to incorporate their technology and programming processes into our own.”

Rhodes dropped his voice to another threatening snarl. “You better not harm them.”

“We won’t harm them. We want to make them part of our system.”

“Forget it!” Rhodes snapped. “You’re talking about wiping them out—erasing their individuality! You would kill them.”

“They would become part of us. We’re the same race. Where else would they belong?”

Rhodes blinked at the guy in disbelief. “The same race?! You mean….you really did come from the Legion?”

“I don’t know about that. None of us knows where we came from. We’ve been searching the sector for our origins. The SAMs are the closest we’ve come to finding it. We have no choice but to study them—and you.” B started to turn away. “You’ll be safe and comfortable here, Captain. You don’t even have to be aware of the tests and procedures we’re running on you and your SAM.”

“I will never cooperate with this!” Rhodes yelled after him. “I’ll do everything in my power to stop you! I won’t stand by and let you experiment on me and my people!”

B turned around and leveled Rhodes with another brutal stare. This was not a condescending smirk. He outright glared at Rhodes.

“You would be making a big mistake not to cooperate with us, Captain,” B muttered. “The experiments are harsh and unpleasant. You don’t want to experience them firsthand. We’re doing you a favor by keeping you here. We don’t have to. Don’t make me take you back there.”

“I already know what the experiments are like because I’ve already experienced them firsthand. I would never let you do that to me or any of my people—not willingly. You might be able to hack me and force me to do your bidding against my will, but I will never cooperate—not ever. I will never stop working to escape from this….” He shot a death glare at the beautiful surroundings. “This prison.”

“This is not a prison, Captain. We created this place so you and your battalion would be comfortable while we conduct our experiments.”

“It’s still a prison. This is a torture worse than anything you could possibly cook up. It isn’t real—and I want to see my people. I want to talk to them and make sure they’re all right….”

“They are all right. They’re here. They’re as comfortable here as you are. You can interact with them here.”

“You mean I can interact with them in a way that’s manipulated by you. You’re interfering with our ability to interact by constructing the environment. I want to see them in the real world. I want to see what they really look like and what they’re really going through. I’ll never believe that they’re all right until I see them for myself—and I’ll never stop trying to find a way out of here.”

B raised his eyebrows. “You would really forsake this comfortable world for the harsh real world? You’re making a mistake, Captain.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“I doubt it. This is a dream world—a fantasy.”

B raised his eyebrows a second time and then shrugged. “Very well, Captain. Since you insist, I will send you back to your friends in the real world. You can see for yourself what condition they’re in and how they’re doing. When you’re ready to come back here and live in peace with us, you only have to say so.”

Rhodes snorted again, but before he could come up with a sufficiently insulting response, the whole beautiful landscape vanished.

It didn’t turn into The Grid with the green lines and black squares. The rolling fields, birds, colorful clouds, mountains, and the town in the distance—they all just….evaporated.

Rhodes found himself standing in a freezing cold metal box. The icy cold immediately bit into his skin and then started to burn. He shivered and that shivering didn’t stop.

He glanced right and left trying to see where he was. A bundle of wires connected from the rib section of his chest implant to the wall on his left.

Alyssa Thackery, Eddie Coulter, and Dane Rhinehart huddled against the wall closest to where more bundles of wires connected them to whatever container they were in.

All three of them were turning blue with the cold—the organic parts of their skin and faces did, at least.

The three of them trembled with endless shivering, but they couldn’t get warm no matter what they did.

Thackery barely looked at Rhodes. Coulter didn’t raise his head at all.

Rhinehart looked up just enough to make eye contact, but that was all. He could barely make himself heard through his shivering blue lips. “Captain…..”

Rhodes’s own shivering got more violent, but at that moment, Fisher appeared on The Grid in front of Rhodes. “Captain—” Fisher’s eyes darted down to Rhodes’s body. “You’re getting dangerously cold.”

Rhodes’s teeth chattered so badly that he couldn’t answer. He was too relieved to see Fisher again—the real Fisher.

The SAM looked like a bird composite again. His eyes welled up with concern—concern as much for himself as for Rhodes. It was the expression Rhodes knew so well.

“Your systems are struggling to compensate, but your implants can’t sufficiently warm your organic tissue,” Fisher went on. “These connections….”

He studied the wires connecting Rhodes to the wall. Fisher overlaid The Grid over them and did his best to scan and read whatever they were doing to Rhodes.

“I believe these are regulating your internal systems to keep you alive,” Fisher told him. “None of you will freeze to death. These conduits will make sure you stay just warm enough to survive—but nothing more.”

Rhodes tried to talk back to Fisher and failed again. Fisher glanced over at the other three. None of them even tried to talk.

“I believe I can interface with Rocky, Koenig, and Murphy, Captain,” Fisher announced. “The four of us should be able to communicate in here even if we can’t contact the rest of the battalion.”

Rhodes found himself struggling to think. The cold muddled his brain.

Fisher waited for him to say something else. “Sit down, Captain,” Fisher ordered. “Standing up like this increases your surface area and makes you colder.”

Rhodes couldn’t think well enough to argue. He staggered to the wall and hunched down next to Thackery. Her skin took on a waxy, almost translucent look as her blood retreated from the surface.

She shuddered so violently that she wound up bumping into Rhodes, but she didn’t notice. She and Coulter sat hunched close to each other, but neither could offer each other any warmth.

Rhinehart sat facing straight out into the room. His eye went dull. None of the three tried to interact with Rhodes.

He didn’t try to talk to them, either. He asked for the real world and he got it. He just didn’t think it would be as bad as this. The Masks certainly knew how to torment him and make him regret his decision.

He didn’t regret it. He hated them even more for doing this to him. He had to fight them. The pain he felt right now hardened that idea in his mind. He had to find a way to stop them from doing all of this.

He pulled his knees up to his chest, but nothing eased the punishing cold. The frigid wall behind him chilled his implants and burned his skin worse than ever.

As soon as he got into that position, Fisher interfaced with Rocky, Murphy, and Koenig. The other three SAMs appeared on The Grid and they all looked around at each other.

“Ah, Captain Rhodes!” Koenig remarked. “We wondered where you were.”

“The Masks took him into a Grid environment,” Fisher explained. “It was a beautiful grassland with a town in the distance.”

“They did the same thing to all of us,” Rocky replied. “I can only assume the Masks took the rest of the battalion there, too.”

“Do you know where they are?” Fisher asked. “Are the battalion members in another compartment like this one?”

“I doubt that,” Murphy replied. “Dane, Eddie, and Alyssa all went to the same Grid environment. The Masks offered to leave them there if we cooperated with their experiments. When we refused to cooperate, the Masks sent us here.”

“The same thing happened to the captain,” Fisher agreed. “So where are the others?”

“They’re still in The Grid, obviously,” Rocky replied. “They must be. They must have agreed to stay there and cooperate. They would be here otherwise. They would be here with us the same way we are.”

“Maybe not,” Koenig remarked. “These compartments might have a capacity of four. Lauer, Oakes, Dietz, and Fuentes might be in another compartment.”

“Something tells me Fuentes didn’t have any problem cooperating,” Murphy muttered under his breath.

“That’s no way to talk about someone in our own battalion,” Koenig countered. “I’m sure Fuentes didn’t willingly sign himself up to be the Masks’ slave lab rat.”

“Did you see the way he enjoyed shooting the Legion soldiers during the battle?” Murphy asked. “He’s been waiting for something like this ever since he tried to kill himself.”

“You don’t know he cooperated with the Masks during the battle,” Fisher pointed out. “The Masks hacked Van the same way they hacked all of us. He isn’t responsible for what he did during the battle.”

“He was laughing,” Murphy snapped. “He enjoyed it. He wanted to kill those soldiers. He would have killed us if he hadn’t been so busy fighting the Masks’ war for them.”

“He’s still a member of our battalion until Captain Rhodes says he isn’t,” Fisher returned. “We have no way of knowing if he’s cooperating with the Masks now.”

Murphy looked away. “He is. They all are. They would be here now if they weren’t.”

“You said that before, but you don’t really know if it’s true,” Rocky added.

“In any case, the four of them are still the Masks’ prisoners,” Fisher went on. “We don’t know that the Masks gave Lauer, Oakes, Dietz, and Fuentes the same choice. The Masks could have left the four of them in The Grid and never even told them they were conducting those experiments.”

“Then why tell us?” Murphy asked.

Rocky opened his mouth to answer, but right then, The Grid flickered. Fisher looked up toward the ceiling.

“It’s nothing,” Koenig told Fisher. “It happens all the time when the Masks send signals, nutrients, and fluids to the prisoners.”

Fisher cocked his head to one side and studied Rhodes through The Grid. “Nod if you can hear me, Captain.”

Rhodes summoned all his mental power to nod his head. He could barely do that much.

The cold became progressively more brutal with every passing minute. Something warm flowed into his chest through these wires, but that only made the cold more unbearable if that was possible.

His lips went numb and so did his eyelid. He had to command himself to blink. When he did, that extra little rush of warmth on his frozen eyeball stabbed him in the brain. It hurt worse than not blinking at all.

“This can’t go on,” Fisher murmured. “The captain is right. We have to do something to get the battalion out of here.”

“How can we do that when the battalion is completely non-functional?” Rocky asked. “None of them can speak or even think straight. We can’t use The Grid to find out where we are. We could be out in space somewhere with no way to escape.”

“Then we have to find out,” Fisher insisted. “We have to find out where the other four are, communicate with them somehow, and then get out of the Masks’ custody.”

“What are you suggesting?” Murphy asked. “I’m listening. We have all the time in the world.”

“We don’t have all the time in the world,” Fisher replied. “These four will die if they stay here. This is just a slow form of torture, but these four can’t survive this cold. Their organic tissue will break down eventually. It will fail the same way it cascaded in the lab.”

“What do you mean—it cascaded?” Koenig asked.

“Never mind. It happened before any of you came online. The important thing is that we get out of here.”

“You still haven’t come up with any useful suggestion,” Murphy pointed out. “None of this means anything without a plan.”

“Then the three of you better start helping me come up with one,” Fisher replied. “All our lives depend on it. I don’t plan to just sit here and let the Masks kill us all.”

End of Chapter 4.